Here’s what Diogenes the blogger passionately wrote:

“One of the most compelling conservative books I have had the fortune to read is Crazy Like A Fox: One Principal’s Triumph in the Inner City, by Dr. Ben Chavis and Carey Blakely. Ironically it was not written as a ‘conservative’ book but conservative principles naturally erupted throughout this memoir of a brave educator that spun trash into gold. I found myself cheering as this politically incorrect America Indian pioneer took over the American Indian Charter Public School in Oakland, California, that was failing in every measurable aspect, a cesspool of illiteracy, and single-handedly brought it to the fifth ranked public school in the state – based on standardized tests! In that process Ben Chavis slashed and burned every stupid liberal idea, from unions to multiculturalism and their decades long ’soft bigotry of low expectations’ – all to the abject horror of the Oakland liberal educational establishment. He was attacked by many leftist-liberal educators but he would turn their criticism into an attack on how they have failed minority education for generations. I am astonished this book has not received more play from the conservative media elements, it is a spectacular read. (Laura Ingraham and John Stossel did cover it.)

“For those of you with the belief that public school education has deteriorated to the point of disaster – and especially inner city schools, and the dominant political party has had a great role to play in its downfall then this book is for you.

“If you thought it was a monumental case of hypocrisy for Barack Obama to send his children to the prestigious Sidwell Friends school while he destroyed the voucher program in DC, which then prevented poor black children from attending the same school – then this book is for you.

“If you are tired of being lectured by Democrats on racism, while they and their union paymasters have for generations kept minority children in a world destined to fail, and never once admitted their grotesque mismanagement or complete negligence about the disastrous consequences – this story is for you – because Ben Chavis has a special message for these ‘pimps’ as he calls them.

“If you are tired of liberals telling the world that not enough is being spent on education and that taxes need to be raised to fix this problem – while they purposely thwart any attempt of accountability for teachers, and fight with tooth and claw the ability to fire incompetent teachers, standardized testing and No Child Left Behind – then this book is for you. Chavis bemoans the money being wasted by a system that is designed to spend and designed to fail. He is a proponent of No Child Left Behind and dedicated the book to it, because he is not afraid of standardized testing and wants to be held accountable – he is the anti-liberal education establishment. Are you listening NJ teachers? I would think Governor Christie would be dispensing this book at meetings.

“Ben Chavis is an American Indian educator and self made wealthy businessman, has struck a rock in the desert with his teacher’s ruler and unleashed an untapped river of pure water. He took over the American Indian Public Charter School in Oakland California, which had a 35% absentee rate, alcohol and marijuana problems, kids having sex on a mattress behind a tool shed, and moronic Oakland teachers spending hours making beads and banging drums to keep the students culturally attuned to their Indian heritage. Chavis, a veritable Hercules, cleaned the Augean Stables of this rot and fired almost everyone working at the school. He painted, scrubbed and revitalized the school building but more importantly he wire brushed the corroded minds around him. He brought absenteeism to 2%, he tracked down mothers in bars at ten in the morning demanding their children come to school, he made math and English a top priority devoting 90 minutes to each subject, he banished all multicultural nonsense from the curriculum, he ended the minority “victimization” mentality and he taught free market capitalism as a color blind road to prosperity. Test scores sky rocketed!

“His growing up as a ‘darkie’, as he calls himself, on an Indian reservation in utter poverty has given him a special insight into the education of minority children. His upbringing had pain, poverty but an incredible wisdom which he has brought to the fore. He studied the Bible and the book is replete with religious symbolism and values. He put a cross on the building and cannily told inquisitors it was the ‘Four Directions’ of the American Indian, while he told his minority students the school was the house of the Lord and to respect it. Chavis made this middle school more like the one class country school house. He gave the students one teacher for all their subjects, and stopped the wasteful and useless rotation of classrooms – bringing stability and lasting relationships to those who lacked it in their lives. He would reward student accomplishments with dollar bills for tasks that he assigned. He pulled up the pants, wiped off the make up and if he had to, shaved the heads of unruly students. He brought rule and order to a world that had been nothing more than a campaign prop for liberal politicians to enhance their own careers while generations of illiterate children were pushed through the system – to become immediate unproductive liabilities of the state.

“Ben Chavis gets it – and in this book he indicts the Democratic Party, even though it is his political party. Education, he says was ceded to them and they have destroyed it with their unions, uncaring attitudes, unaccountability and the wasting of billions of dollars. Ben Chavis walks it likes he talks it because he made it rain in the desert, and Governor Schwarzenegger came twice to visit. His results are astounding for an inner city school – but the recognition doesn’t seem enough and it makes one wonder that he has too many political enemies? (Recently, he called Charles Barron, black radical politician in NY, a pimp and offered to take the argument outside.)

“In Ben Chavis’ words: ‘My approach to race and culture at AIPCS is nothing like the victimization and babying of minorities preached in teacher credential programs and implemented in public schools. I prefer hiring smart, uncredentialed teachers because many credential programs brainwash educators to teach in a way that is soft, ineffectual, and focused on non-academic topics, such as self-esteem and multiculturalism.’ p102

“ ‘President Barack Obama has indicated he will push for an additional $80 million to train public school teachers. In California, teachers must complete a five year higher education program to qualify for a teaching credential. Then, once they are employed by public schools, millions of dollars are spent on teacher training for these college graduates. If you’ve spent five years in higher education and you still can’t teach, how is more money going to help you? Could it be we need to restructure the colleges of education instead of wasting more money?’ P103

“On a dispute over strict dress codes with a liberal teacher, he does not suffer fools gladly: ‘I don’t care what you think, and I’m tired of you guys helping the students undermine the rules. Some of you are letting them wear their shirts out. Mr. Bates, these kids can be anarchists like you if they go to a stick-it-to-the-Man college like you did, but they’re not going to be anarchists here. How are these kids ever going to get into your private college? You know, I’ve gone all over the state looking at secondary schools, and not a single one of them that uses a liberal philosophy with ghetto students is worth a damn. All this liberalism has screwed over minorities. You think they’re poor and underprivileged and they can’t cut it, so you give them an easy way out. It’s people like you who have f_____ed over my people and I am sick of it.’……’You know, I’m a Democrat, too, and sometimes when I look in the mirror I can’t stand what I see because we haven’t done anything for minorities in public education. All this left wing liberalism has destroyed generations of minorities.’ P164

“The education establishment has attacked him, they despise him, because he has grabbed them by the scruff of the neck and wiped their faces in the excrement that they have spewed in the halls of inner city schools for decades – and they can’t take the stench of their own filth. (Some of the attacks are purely racist – saying he is bringing in Chinese kids, and the assertions are not true.) Since when has a labor union been able to contribute to the intellectual development of another human being – the whole concept is ridiculous. It also assumes that teachers are fungible, one is as good as another – which why so few are fired in their cushioned, unrealistic world.

“Maybe they should make this required reading at all teachers’ colleges. Chavis is spreading his message but not quick enough. His accomplishments are all the more fantastic when one realizes that 74% of his student body uses English as a second language in the home. When political arguments go on and on and solve nothing – here is someone with damn answers, damn glorious answers, and he has proved it beyond a shadow of doubt. Stop spending money, get rid of unions, find the right teachers, good daily structure, family, accountability, high expectations, cleanliness, detention, no to racist affirmative action, emphasize the academic, teach capitalism, and if you act like a fool you will be treated like one.”

http://diogenes-honest-politician.blogspot.com/2010/07/democrats-lies-and-awful-education-of.html

Here it is:

“I had to take over and a 5th and 6th grade Special Day Class at the last minute due to an emergency situation one Monday.  Knowing the teacher quite well and being a former sixth grade teacher myself, I felt confident and figured it would be an easy ½ day.  I walked in to find eight students and two aids spread randomly throughout the room not working at all and no lesson plans in sight.  The kids were all over the place, I saw no books on desks and not a single student had a pencil out. When I asked them to please sit in their seats, the response from one boy was, ‘We don’t got no seats. We sit wherever.’

“This had become common to me. As a coach I have the opportunity to visit and teach in sixty some classrooms between two schools and was starting to realize that how I taught and ran a classroom was not at all close to how most of the teachers in our district were teaching and running theirs, veterans or not.  By now my mouth was ready to run. ‘Wow, what fantastic English you have. Sit right in the front so we can make it even better!’ His smile faded immediately, but he obeyed. Naturally I was getting no help from either of the aids. After getting rid of gum, silencing the kids and creating a seating arrangement I was finally able to begin teaching.

“In November I should be able to walk into a room and take over that second and not have to waste valuable minutes on classroom management.  Nevertheless, I was able to teach grammar, reading comprehension strategies and even some writing, which apparently was new to most of them.  They were well behaved and engaged the rest of the day.  For the English Language Development block I welcomed 12 new students with similar learning abilities and attitudes. The frustrating part of that block was not only the time I spent going through the retraining process again, but the activity assigned.  When I asked one aid where the activity sheets were that had been listed on the board, I was handed a stack of coloring pages.  These supposed activity sheets had very basic sentences on the bottom of the page in small print while the picture took up pretty much the entire page. ‘You mean they just color this? That’s it? For 35 minutes, they just color? Does it go with something? What is the lesson?’ I ranted at the aid.  Her response was awesome, ‘Well, yesterday they wrote their names and today they color the picture.  Here are the colored pencils.’

“This is a program that our district had spent umpteen thousands on to adopt and our kids are going to color? I pretty much almost lost it then, but bit my lip, tossed the ‘activity sheets’ aside and decided to teach a vocabulary lesson focusing on some of the words I read in the sentences.  Again, the students were engaged, participating in discussion and learning.  What a concept! Probably the most irritating part of my day did not have anything to do with the students, but with the aids.  Their English was horrible and one of them would not stop speaking Spanish to one student, translating my every word and at one point even writing for the child!  I couldn’t take it anymore and had to step in.  I asked her to let him please just listen to my lessons for a little bit and to stop translating for him. She seemed a little undone, but got over it. I talked to the boy several times throughout that day and even though most of his responses were nods, he did talk to me a little.  So he can speak!  Why aren’t we letting him?  This is what I can’t stand about how we choose to teach English Language Learners.  Coddling just doesn’t work.

“Later in the lounge, both the aids came running up to me like little school girls do to their teacher.  ‘How did you do that? They were quiet and learning, that was great!  We never do writing!’ These two veteran aids, who I thought hated me during my reign in their room, were flabbergasted at what I had done.  As flattered as I was it only made my blood boil.  My only response was, ‘They will only do what you expect of them.’ As much as I am learning from this job, the more frustrated I get with our school system. We are doing nothing but enabling these kids.  We make excuses and refuse to raise our expectations. It is incredibly aggravating.”

Coplon writes about charter schools: “Can privately run schools justly take public money while excluding the most vulnerable students? And should children be pushed to their limits—and beyond—to prove they can best their suburban counterparts on some flawed and arbitrary exam?”

Again, charter schools are not privately run! They are public schools. I don’t know enough about the school leader described in Coplon’s article, Eva Moskowitz, or her schools, Success Charter Network, to comment on the exclusion of students, but I definitely take issue with calling standardized tests “flawed and arbitrary.”

This article is another example of taking a charter school’s enormous success (the students’ test scores were incredible) and completely undercutting that success by saying the tests don’t mean a thing.

Coplon also writes about standardized tests: “Despite their well-documented defects, these assessments are the make-or-break barometer of a school’s ‘accountability’ and a vital marketing tool for high-performing charter networks. Lofty numbers bedazzle authorizers and lure fat checks from foundations and trustees.”

If the “defects” are so “well-documented”, then why doesn’t Coplon back up his assertions with some evidence? If people truly believe, like Coplon does, that test scores do not demonstrate a school’s “accountability”, then they assume that parents would be just as comfortable enrolling their child in a school where 0% of students tested proficient in English as one in which 100% of students tested proficient in English.

And what’s so wrong about foundations and trustees signing “fat checks” to support schools? They are trying to help children who come from poor, uneducated families succeed in life. Oh, the horror.

Did Coplon notice how every family member quoted in his article was absolutely thrilled that his/her child was enrolled in a Success Charter Network school?

For example: “Some might deem this excessive, but Ashley’s grandmother, Yvette Rolack, was delighted with the extra attention—and with Ashley’s pair of 3’s. ‘They really stayed with the kids to help them get where they needed to go,’ she says. ‘I am a security guard, and I like my job, but I want my granddaughter to excel and not just stand at the door and nod her head and give directions. I want more for her.’

Unfortunately, opponents of charter schools want less for her because they fight to protect, uphold, and make excuses for a failing inner-city public school system rather than offering children and their families choices and opportunities.

I, quite frankly, like Eva Moskowitz’s quote that some people “believe in choice for themselves, but they don’t believe in choice for other people. To me, that is really fundamental to social justice: to have choices in life.”

Let the people, not the politics, choose.

Here’s the article in its entirety–worth reading despite the bias, in my opinion:

http://nymag.com/news/features/65614/

During one period I was a P.E. assistant. The P.E. teacher was absent and had left for his substitute the plans to let the students shoot baskets in the gym. That sounded pretty simple until I realized upon entering that there were about 60 students in the P.E. class. I dodged flying basketballs and volleyballs–I don’t know if I’ve ever seen so many unspectacular teenage athletes in one place before–to walk over to the substitute P.E. teacher to see what I could do to help. Basketballs and volleyballs zoomed across the gym with no aim or order and their loud crashes made the gym reverberate like a war zone.

Many students were launching shots from half court, which means that other students were dodging their airballs. Some students were kicking volleyballs so that they ricocheted off the walls and flew every which way. Now, it’s important that I say two things here: 1. I was just supposed to be the assistant; since the P.E. substitute didn’t see any problem with the situation, I didn’t want to infringe on her authority. 2. I’ve often been the stern substitute teacher at this school of no discipline and no structure, and I’ve found that I need to choose my battles carefully because the students–who are used to behaving disrespectfully and doing very little work–don’t respond well to authority, and when I’ve called in the administration for back-up after asserting my authority, I’ve usually received very little help.

So, there I was biting my tongue and finding every opportunity to leave the gym (even though it was raining) by delivering the attendance to the office, etc. I was practically getting whiplash from trying to steer clear of so many flying balls, and I was trying to stay as calm as possible in the face of such awful noise and disorder.

Man, I hate chaotic situations. And I especially hate chaotic situations in schools. After working at American Indian Public Charter School and American Indian Public High School and seeing how students can thrive academically and get in great shape when there is structure, discipline, academic rigor, and a no-nonsense approach to P.E., I have a hard time tolerating schools that don’t provide that environment.

From what I could gather, the plan to shoot baskets was a common one for the P.E. teacher. He obviously doesn’t share my same aversions to noise and chaos, but I couldn’t help but think out of the blue: Would this ever be acceptable behavior in China? I had a vision of students lined up in straight lines doing exercises in place, like jumping jacks, push ups, stretches, martial arts, etc. I had another vision of students jogging–without cutting corners–around the gym and running sprints. (Like at AIPCS.)

I was an award-winning basketball player in high school, and I could not stand this sight of so many out of control, out of shape, horrible little basketball players spazzing around. I wanted to line them up and get them working out and following instructions, but with 60 students, 100 balls, 0 whistles, and no authority I figured it was best to let the impulse pass.

It was also baffling to me that the students could gleefully participate in the chaos. It was as if their tolerance for loud noise and craziness had gotten so high that they didn’t even realize how chaotic their environment was. Needless to say, the remainder of my day as a substitute in the classroom was frustrating. Though I could control the noise level and disorder better in a classroom, I still ran into what I always run into at this low-performing middle school: The students are used to acting like fools and having no consequences for their actions, so when I am strict with them I receive a lot of attitude, back talk, power struggles–just overall defiance.

It’s not their fault per se–it’s the lack of structure, discipline, and academic rigor that surrounds them day in and day out. They’re not given a sound educational environment, so they don’t even know what it would mean to behave properly within one.

At the elementary school, they use what is called a “Dual Language Immersion Program.” It’s not exactly “dual”, however, when you consider that the vast majority of the school day is spent learning Spanish and academic subjects in Spanish.

For example, kindergarten students will spend about 90% of the school day using Spanish for their academic subjects and 10% of the school day using English. In 1st grade the ratio of Spanish to English becomes about 80/20; 2nd grade is 70/30; 3rd grade is 60/40; 4th grade is 50/50. It’s unclear what will happen in 5th grade as the program has not yet been implemented at that grade level.

To be completely honest, I find this model ridiculous. Why would you take such young students–students who have the opportunity and advantage of learning English from the get-go–and train them in Spanish instead of English? It does not make any sense to me. Advocates in the school district claim that it takes many years to become fluent in English, so this instructional model makes for a smoother transition. I think when you are five years old you can soak up English like a sponge, so spending 90% of the school day in Spanish is counterproductive.

Parents in the district choose whether they want their child in the “English Only” program or the “Dual Language” program. What truly baffles me is when white parents put their children in the “Dual Language” program here. I know they are hoping that their kids will be fluent in two languages, which is a great ambition, but I think the method is unsound and so the result is that their kids end up inadequate in both languages. Think about it: If your primary language is English and you are spending 90% of the school day learning Spanish in kindergarten, when will you learn English phonics, math vocabulary in English, writing in English?

I think this is also a case of what happens when educators have “great ideas” and use parents and students as guinea pigs. Parents generally have a lot of faith in educators so when the dual language program is excitedly presented to them by a teacher or administrator, they tend to go along with it and decide to give it a try. Years later when their child’s understanding of English is far below grade level, they may or may not realize their optimism was misguided.

The Cato Institute recently aired a podcast called “A Charter School That Works.” Caleb Brown interviewed Ben Chavis about American Indian Public Charter School’s model as well as replicating successful charter school models on a larger scale.

Ben pointed out some of the roadblocks to reform. One problem is that underperforming public schools get monetarily rewarded. He said, “You get paid to be a failure…Failing schools get more money than successful schools, so public schools have a vested financial interest in not being successful.” School districts’ resistance to opening more charter schools is another common obstacle to reform. Ben explained how Oakland Unified School District is against opening more American Indian Model charter schools, so there is a need to circumvent the district and look to the state for approval.

Another issue Ben points out is space. It’s difficult to find building facilities for charter schools. One suggestion he makes is for there to be a policy in which districts hand over or sell their vacant regular public schools to charter schools. In the interview, Dr. Chavis also addresses the need for stronger school leaders and for a system that allows smart people to make a difference. He says, “Most people are smart enough not to get involved in the quagmire called public education…There’s not a shortage of teachers. There’s a shortage of teachers who will put up with nonsense. They’re not going to be in a school system where they cannot succeed.”

http://www.cato.org/dailypodcast/podcast-archive.php?podcast_id=1021 (Click on the November 5, 2009 podcast)

Jay Mathews, the education columnist for The Washington Post, wrote about Crazy Like a Fox and AIPCS’s education model in an excellent article entitled “A Crazy Idea for Middle Schools”. The piece was published on Friday, October 2.

Here’s the link: http://voices.washingtonpost.com/class-struggle/2009/10/a_crazy_idea_for_middle_school.html?hpid=news-col-blog